I was pleasantly surprised when the word 'erlang' sprung up in a discussion at ilugc threads courtesy one of Vamsee 's posts. I was naturally excited and looked forward to the talk scheduled at the local ruby user group chennai.rb on the same Saturday. Weekends usually begin at the beach at 5.30am to sweat it out in a awesome non-contact rugbie like sport called ultimate frisbee. Check out the yahoo group which has a 60 members and growing , and include most of the 20-30 odd people who turn up before sunrise on weekends despite the ballistic rains!

Speaking of rains, i guess the rubyists in chennai did think twice before venturing out yesterday . The venue was also changed last minute, but i had no problem of having a meet with just 5-6 people. And i'm glad i did go ! There was John - from Tachyon whose innovative work i've had real appreciation for earlier,(they've made quilpad and rediff even invested in them some time ago)

John's talk was interestingly on squeak -an avtar of smalltalk in which he demo'ed the tightly integrated concept of user and system generated object , scriptable etoys, several ways in which programming could be tackled by children in a more user-friendly and 'just works' manner . It's a real treat to have someone like him around who understands the intricacies of so many languages and core computer science concepts. I've attached the mind map exported jpegs (cmaps)of both talks ,and you access my cmaps of the talks here.

Vamsee's talk on erlang started with the history and introduction of the language , neatly swapping between code showing the assignment,basic operations and arithmetic, strings handling, tuples atoms and lists, and indeed was a nice opportunity to throw open the discussion comparing with the same in other languages.

Gapp , was there as well and he talked about his upcoming project that involves capturing one moment in the lives of chennai' ites, more specifically - November 3rd 2007 by aggregating pictures into a flickr pool with snapshots of wherever u are in chennai at that point of time . check out the details at the official 311pm website.

Overall, i think with the talks especially of the one on erlang, the stage is set to work on yaws , and take the startup to the next step indeed 8 ) Railsfactory and reviewsaurus apart from a 360 degree employee turned up. It was a little funny when they realised that i was aka Bosky since I've grown a real thick beard. I usually always introduce myself as Bhasker. Nice to know that ur known in some circles ! 8 ) .

After the talk, we talked about what all of us were upto. Very exhilarating to know that each and everyone who turned up were involved in either a 2-10 strong startup or some project creative project . Vamsee talking about the good,bad and the ugly facets of working on google knockoffs . Challening all the same ! I might even think of taking two seats in their office as well for working on my venture . Left around 7-8, Gapp tells me that they even continued with beer and more talk till 11. Shoot,missed out on that 8 ) !

Vamsee also suggested that i, or anyone for that matter have a shot at the next speaking session which would continue to be at his neat office of his company Viamentis. Clearly the ruby user group definitely stands out because we did'nt even have a formal session on ruby itself ,although we did compare other languages and compare notes with the nice projector (coutesy sayid of TKF) Perhaps i would have a go at the functional nature of javascript ,or perhaps hopefully even erlang. I'm sure PVS would have loved to be at the meet, especially since he's the one who encouraged me to venture into the abyss that is erlang by his experiments with ejabbered and take concurrent programming . Moreover, The apache Vs yaws debate seems one-sided enough to convince me to get my own testing environment setup on my lappy. As with most languages, the best way i feel to learn a language is indeed porting x from language A to language B. Looking forward to a little unlearning , more such meets ,more frisbee on weekends ,and a lot of addictive hacking ahead 8 )

Off late i've been adding a lot more blogs from media/ blogosphere (techcrunch 'ish blogs, company blogs , and so on ) apart from the developer blogs that i cherish the most . One of the categories that i have been having a close watch and building on are indian developers who are being there and doing that ; ) You'll most of the individuals mentioned in my post about indian hacker's in the opml file as well . Ofcourse, most of the list are people I would personally know or like to know but as a technology / web geek i think that sharing this list would really help introduce you to a lot of really good blogs.

I'm also surprised why there is'nt any viral site for sharing rss reader opml files ?!(or is it just my ignorance!). So i'm going to upload my opml files once a quarter so that it might be useful to other hackers, entrepreneurs and technology watchers like me .

And here's for an awesome tip . Sure it wont be easy reading up on 1000+ , i'd prefer to take my time and read most of them . (especially if u skip a day or two ! ) SO what i've done is what i think a more leisurely way to read my favourite blogs without the clutter and time constraints .

Here's what i did two days back :I installed a desktop rss reader on my laptop. I imported my google reader opml . Once a day i go online and let it autoupdate . Finito ! now i can take my time, change the themes ,font's ,add rating ,see my reading statistics, custom tags, searches ,bookmarks, even blog from it, and more importantly - take my time to read all the 1000+ feed items ,as and when i want.

step 1: exported my google opml file.im guessing that you are familiar with rss readers, and blogs and rss . If you use a bloglines or a google reader there should be a export subscription /export feeds / export as opml option somewhere. save the file on your system. Here are my google reader opml files.

step 2: downloaded a desktop rss readerI expected a little more from google readers offline operation that used google gears. sadly though it just did'nt work . Moving on, i looked around for a couple of desktop rss readers. ended up on just installin one though called blogbridge . FYI : a nice link that higlights 9 reasons to use desktop readers, and here's another one that tells you how to make your own desktop rss reader. i then imported the opml file, and can choose as to when it should update (either on program startup or when i say to get updates )

i still like to still to maintain / add feeds ,etc to my online rss reader(google reader) since i can access them when im not on either my machine or the laptop. another hassle is that after reading posts from the desktop reader- they wont be 'marked as read' ,but i still think that the move has let me catch up with the 'posts that i always wanted to take time to read' and the 'blogs i never had time to read and so on' ,and all this offline . I think it's worth it thinking /trying it out.

The best part of being a startup is that you are forced to tackling specific problems.

It was a few months after i started the Returnable Project in March,2007 that i heard about the 11$mn odd funding that israeli startup kontera had received. Returnable , was pretty similiar - i said to myself but with a more developer and architectural perspective . It started off, and continues to be a small pet project i maintain with PVS - that deals with content delivery for end-user programmers ,but more catered to developers and the software engineering spectrum. It was to let ordinary end-users to concentrate on what to bring in in-text, instead of the how. Another entrepreneur buddy was also discussing ways to invoke returnable within their product. And so it is with a sense of pride and excitement that i assess that for a open source project I think it has served as a testing bed for things to come. I definitely am glad to see the buzz "contextual delivery" , apart from the the continued voids and irregularities that are still persistently haunting adopters of in-text content and ad delivery.

There are already a lot of players in the advertising space who offer in-text advertisements, and so on. There's Kontera, Miva , snapshot (that does a good job with the screenshots), addThis (fo social bookmarks) and so on. Can companies like Proximic or for that matter Kontera afford to give competitors another five years before building “contextual content delivery” and “in-text advertising” expertise ?

The best part of being a startup is that you are forced to tackling specific problems.

It was a few months after i started the Returnable Project in March,2007 that i heard about the 11$mn odd funding that israeli startup kontera had received. Returnable , was pretty similiar - i said to myself but with a more developer and architectural perspective . It started off, and continues to be a small pet project i maintain with PVS - that deals with content delivery for end-user programmers ,but more catered to developers and the software engineering spectrum. It was to let ordinary end-users to concentrate on what to bring in in-text, instead of the how. Another entrepreneur buddy was also discussing ways to invoke returnable within their product. And so it is with a sense of pride and excitement that i assess that for a open source project I think it has served as a testing bed for things to come. I definitely am glad to see the buzz "contextual delivery" , apart from the the continued voids and irregularities that are still persistently haunting adopters of in-text content and ad delivery.

There are already a lot of players in the advertising space who offer in-text advertisements, and so on. There's Kontera, Miva , snapshot (that does a good job with the screenshots), addThis (fo social bookmarks) and so on. Can companies like Proximic or for that matter Kontera afford to give competitors another five years before building “contextual content delivery” and “in-text advertising” expertise ?

About indian hackers... ohh they're out there all right... they're out there.

indian cities like chennai ,bangalore,bombay ,pune and delhi have really making the most of the unconference,hacker & silicon valley culture that's slowly building up.

There have always been examples of startups with a combination of design and development teams across india and us can do . take zimbra, riya , slingshot ,et cetera, or the bigger and more established zoho and slideshare . but for the smaller ones, you need to keep your eyes glued to unconferences .

Its run by gud friend - and pythonista siddhi govindraj who for instance runs a one man project management s/w called silver stripe. Hey i think i might even talk more about the best hacker's in india i've had the privilege of ...uhmm adding to their feed subscriber list 8 )

ravi mohan, who just happened to port all of google director peter norvig's AI book code to java - is a one-man hacker working on nothing but the best of AI related work for the past few years.

swaroop ch , whose python hackery got him into adobe's flex team in india ,has written a book on python .he's one of the inventors of the ipod charger called ion.

gopal v, heads the open source project dotGNU,apart from contributions to native php code from yahoo's bangalore office is one of the most talented native code hacker's out there when it comes to the open source stack.

sriram krishnan, who 's story and 'curve to geekdom' is possibly the most enchanting, is a great example of a hacker getting noticed in the blogosphere, and all the way to microsoft.he nows works in the popfly team at redmond.

sidu ponnappa, is very 'agile' hacker with very diverse skill sets working in thoughtworks bangalore, apart from a very interesting mobile sideline project with a few friends called inactiv .

abdul qabiz, macromedia/adobe/yahoo/ and now hacker at Nanocasts r&d (called Mixercast ) is a hacker in the flash/flash space.

pvsundarram, who's addiction for designing scalable apps from native mvc to jabber & erlang ,to javascript hackery has taken this hacker to be invited for a number of startups in bangalore,bombay and chennai. he now works at zoomin ,and was my colleague at tutorvista where we worked on the whiteboard & chat collaboration product.

Heck, even i' ve quit and now finally taken time off to hack up a few open source projects, apart from bootstrapping for the startup i'm co-founding . (Note: this is where i hint that ppl interested in joined me can ping me ;) )

one thing about all of them is that they're all got a very diverese skillset,and can express themselves verry well.i could go on with more people i know..hmm wish i could export my google opml .... The day of reckoning will however be when the first ycombinator with indian hacker's . Grab a couple of the names from above and make a team - now that my friends will be history in the making 8 )

But anyways - in the end we've can't say that we don't have the hacker's right now . i think it's the "getting it to market" ability that we are still perfecting. and part of that has to do with the eco-system for startups and entrepreneurs...

The good news is that that's exactly what is fortunately getting better ... in fact when i read "icon : steve jobs" a few quarters ago - i could'nt help but notice how lucky i was to be in india right now. Very much reminiscent of the hacker culture from the 1980's ...

About indian hackers... ohh they're out there all right... they're out there.

indian cities like chennai ,bangalore,bombay ,pune and delhi have really making the most of the unconference,hacker & silicon valley culture that's slowly building up.

There have always been examples of startups with a combination of design and development teams across india and us can do . take zimbra, riya , slingshot ,et cetera, or the bigger and more established zoho and slideshare . but for the smaller ones, you need to keep your eyes glued to unconferences .

Its run by gud friend - and pythonista siddhi govindraj who for instance runs a one man project management s/w called silver stripe. Hey i think i might even talk more about the best hacker's in india i've had the privilege of ...uhmm adding to their feed subscriber list 8 )

ravi mohan, who just happened to port all of google director peter norvig's AI book code to java - is a one-man hacker working on nothing but the best of AI related work for the past few years.

swaroop ch , whose python hackery got him into adobe's flex team in india ,has written a book on python .he's one of the inventors of the ipod charger called ion.

gopal v, heads the open source project dotGNU,apart from contributions to native php code from yahoo's bangalore office is one of the most talented native code hacker's out there when it comes to the open source stack.

sriram krishnan, who 's story and 'curve to geekdom' is possibly the most enchanting, is a great example of a hacker getting noticed in the blogosphere, and all the way to microsoft.he nows works in the popfly team at redmond.

sidu ponnappa, is very 'agile' hacker with very diverse skill sets working in thoughtworks bangalore, apart from a very interesting mobile sideline project with a few friends called inactiv .

abdul qabiz, macromedia/adobe/yahoo/ and now hacker at Nanocasts r&d (called Mixercast ) is a hacker in the flash/flash space.

pvsundarram, who's addiction for designing scalable apps from native mvc to jabber & erlang ,to javascript hackery has taken this hacker to be invited for a number of startups in bangalore,bombay and chennai. he now works at zoomin ,and was my colleague at tutorvista where we worked on the whiteboard & chat collaboration product.

Heck, even i' ve quit and now finally taken time off to hack up a few open source projects, apart from bootstrapping for the startup i'm co-founding . (Note: this is where i hint that ppl interested in joined me can ping me ;) )

one thing about all of them is that they're all got a very diverese skillset,and can express themselves verry well.i could go on with more people i know..hmm wish i could export my google opml .... The day of reckoning will however be when the first ycombinator with indian hacker's . Grab a couple of the names from above and make a team - now that my friends will be history in the making 8 )

But anyways - in the end we've can't say that we don't have the hacker's right now . i think it's the "getting it to market" ability that we are still perfecting. and part of that has to do with the eco-system for startups and entrepreneurs...

The good news is that that's exactly what is fortunately getting better ... in fact when i read "icon : steve jobs" a few quarters ago - i could'nt help but notice how lucky i was to be in india right now. Very much reminiscent of the hacker culture from the 1980's ...

I dont want to open stuff in new tabs . How about having a different desktop Firefox Instance (FYI:i dint say 'process') for every SSB.

no "virtual machine"ish sort of setup, but simply is Firefox-tweaked and called WebRunner as the run-time for apps

target users: people who like a seperate webrunner for each site

upside : (yet to find any !)

downside & what i would have liked to see : why on earth would i want something that gives absolutely no value to me as a developer !!! if webrunner concentrated on building a class library with decent system access documentation(sorry to say,i still dont find the mozilla docs on these half as useful or readable compared to say flex docs). forget even building your own, atleast i shud have interfaces in webrunner for all possible classes and then plug'n'play with js libraries like jquery /dojo or hell make a new project on mozilla just to create just the plug'n'play interfaces for webrunner first,and maybe a decent js api for creating,accessing SVG. It really pisses me off every time webrunner is compared to adobe air. its beyond comparison, mozilla and webrunner cannot be sit back on the laurels of firefox for the success of webrunner. instead it shud actually code a class library that can be shipped with webrunners or ssb's or whatever 'schemes' Mark Finkle has on his mind. Coz personally webrunner does'nt even seem like an app worth talking just because it's stripping off the firefox browser. The first Webrunner was prototyped in 06, and not one new feature that was'nt courtesy of firefox! That's sad even compared to the progress made by silverlight - a late entrant! Webrunner, needs to innovate as well, and quick - if it wants to really play with in the big league !

having flash apps work for the desktop seems like a gud idea.

I don't want to open a browser for every flash app. How about having a single desktop run-time for all adobe air apps

"Virtual Machine"ish Adobe AIR is the run-time for my apps

target users: people who like a seperate webrunner for each site

downside: another process clobbering with my cpu memory if it becomes popular !

upside : adobe has effectively solved a major porting problem by allowing flash developers to write in a language they prefer, and access the beautiful and growing class libraries for everything from system ,to math,to vector graphics.

what i would have liked to see : just keep it going ... and don't bloat the runtime size too quickly!

By the way,i'm not biased towards any one side (or the third - silverlight 8 ) ), but have always respected both mozilla, firefox and everyone involved ; as well as the phenomenal innovation shown by adobe with flex and apollo.

Reading up on a few interesting mailing lists over at flex_india google group, hdiidc , and barcamp_Bangalore (both yahoo groups) .

Reading up on a lot of interesting indian techie's blogs. (speaking of which , it would be great to be able to have a sumup of indian geek's blog posts)

Contemplating on lot of ideas on, ways to improve the Returnable project, reading up the parse trees while i'm half way through compiling x to y , whats next for startups, learning and the idea of higher education abroad, and the future... hmmm

Amidst some domain renewal and hosting provider hassles, ended up continuing with square brothers . They happen to host the university results, and have not problems with them personally. Just got pissed when bhaskervk.com showed up with the default taken sort of mesage, since i delayed my payment by a day since they icici bank could'nt confirm them as a payee. Most of the times, you should'nt have any problems , but now and then you do have certain glitches and usability problems. Like long periods of 'wait while we update' lasting days for even stuff like changing numbers, or that it should probably enter the 'hall of shame' for not supporting firefox most of the time and promptly proposing ie. Not that i have against ie, but as india's biggest private bank, lack of support for atlllleast A-grade browsers is an absolute show-stopper.

I also added a little comic strip called 'screenshots', for all the vetti time that i have on my hands. Plus its a great outlet for some artisitc creativity. check it out some time. The image you see at the top of this post ,is the independence day special (#5) .

If you find this interesting, you will definitely find the stuff over at Aviary, compelling - though it does a little over ambitious.More than 14 online tools of varying complexity: an image editor, color swatch generator, pattern generator, vector-based editor, 3D modeler, audio editor, music generator, video editor, desktop publishing tool, word processor, painting simulator, custom image product creator, photo analyzer, and file system to store it all on. phew ! Check out their well updated and informative blog as well.

Google, btw has been talking about a special gift for india, celebrating it's i-day. wonder if it has anything to do with a mapping /google earth related.

Coming to Returnable, i've seen a couple of similiar prototpes springing up . First i saw a israeli startup called koncara getting its second round of funding with in-text advertising. Returnable can do this, but now just ads but also in-text content on tooltips at different events .Secondly, the purple -include library profiled by ajaxian. While they have used src,and dont have support for events, returnable supports the three events : onhover,onclick and onload. Moreover, Returnable uses the href (forward compatible for all elements in the next version of xhtml5) and users can get the content either in-text OR as a tooltip ! PVS, my c0-developer at Returnable, even managed to get a returnable element tooltip inside the title of a blogger post !

I'm glad the Returnable Project, has taken a lead in this pioneering end-user programming methodology ,in using their inherent knowledge of URL's to expose a simnple HTML api to spawn intuitive behaviour on the web. Check out more on The Returnable Project , and the project site for more information.

So many things to read & write about , so little time ! btw, does anyone know of any good blogs to get lil tidbits like what ive posted above ? I'd love to check them out ! 8 )

Reading up on a few interesting mailing lists over at flex_india google group, hdiidc , and barcamp_Bangalore (both yahoo groups) .

Reading up on a lot of interesting indian techie's blogs. (speaking of which , it would be great to be able to have a sumup of indian geek's blog posts)

Contemplating on lot of ideas on, ways to improve the Returnable project, reading up the parse trees while i'm half way through compiling x to y , whats next for startups, learning and the idea of higher education abroad, and the future... hmmm

Amidst some domain renewal and hosting provider hassles, ended up continuing with square brothers . They happen to host the university results, and have not problems with them personally. Just got pissed when bhaskervk.com showed up with the default taken sort of mesage, since i delayed my payment by a day since they icici bank could'nt confirm them as a payee. Most of the times, you should'nt have any problems , but now and then you do have certain glitches and usability problems. Like long periods of 'wait while we update' lasting days for even stuff like changing numbers, or that it should probably enter the 'hall of shame' for not supporting firefox most of the time and promptly proposing ie. Not that i have against ie, but as india's biggest private bank, lack of support for atlllleast A-grade browsers is an absolute show-stopper.

I also added a little comic strip called 'screenshots', for all the vetti time that i have on my hands. Plus its a great outlet for some artisitc creativity. check it out some time. The image you see at the top of this post ,is the independence day special (#5) .

If you find this interesting, you will definitely find the stuff over at Aviary, compelling - though it does a little over ambitious.More than 14 online tools of varying complexity: an image editor, color swatch generator, pattern generator, vector-based editor, 3D modeler, audio editor, music generator, video editor, desktop publishing tool, word processor, painting simulator, custom image product creator, photo analyzer, and file system to store it all on. phew ! Check out their well updated and informative blog as well.

Google, btw has been talking about a special gift for india, celebrating it's i-day. wonder if it has anything to do with a mapping /google earth related.

Coming to Returnable, i've seen a couple of similiar prototpes springing up . First i saw a israeli startup called koncara getting its second round of funding with in-text advertising. Returnable can do this, but now just ads but also in-text content on tooltips at different events .Secondly, the purple -include library profiled by ajaxian. While they have used src,and dont have support for events, returnable supports the three events : onhover,onclick and onload. Moreover, Returnable uses the href (forward compatible for all elements in the next version of xhtml5) and users can get the content either in-text OR as a tooltip ! PVS, my c0-developer at Returnable, even managed to get a returnable element tooltip inside the title of a blogger post !

I'm glad the Returnable Project, has taken a lead in this pioneering end-user programming methodology ,in using their inherent knowledge of URL's to expose a simnple HTML api to spawn intuitive behaviour on the web. Check out more on The Returnable Project , and the project site for more information.

So many things to read & write about , so little time ! btw, does anyone know of any good blogs to get lil tidbits like what ive posted above ? I'd love to check them out ! 8 )